


goldfish style

by nicasio_silang



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies RPF, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, Goats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-26
Updated: 2012-05-26
Packaged: 2017-11-06 01:02:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You spin in your spinning chair and bring up eBay on your phone, search it for “celebrity heads”. Before anything comes up, though, you get a call.</p>
            </blockquote>





	goldfish style

**Author's Note:**

> I did no research whatsoever about anything in this. But I am pretty sure that Ruffalo owns a goat.

You find it really soothing to be around Mark because he’s totally at peace with the world. Not that he thinks the world is perfect by any means, far from it, but he’s at peace with the chaos. It’s very un-Hulk of him, actually, once you get to thinking about it, because Banner’s this guy who’s all torn up about weird shit happening and about waking up naked in the middle of nowhere, but Mark could wake up in the middle of nowhere, shrug, dust himself off, throw a leaf over his junk and set off on foot to find the nearest vegan brunch. 

“Are we... when are we...? We’re not shooting today, right?”

In other words he just seems never sure why he’s anywhere or how he got there or what day it is, but he’s cool with it. Goldfish life.

“No, yeah, they just want to take molds. Of our faces. Well, my face for the frozen scene, you might get a little...moldier.” Good one! Good one.

“Oh good, good. There’s a goat situation at home, so I gotta be on Skype in a couple hours.”

He says this in the manner of _I gotta pick up some tampons for the old lady_. Self-effacing, and expecting camaraderie. So you gotta smile, or else you’re some kinda jerk. You smile.

“Sounds...serious?”

“Oh, you know goats. Everything’s a crisis.”

It turns out they do want to just mold your faces today, in fact your entire heads. They make you put on these pale swimming caps, bald cap things, and there’s a row of mirrors so you get to see how you look without any hair. It’s not great. 

“Is my head really this pointy? I look like a conehead.” 

Also your features look even smaller, like your face is too small for your head, but you don’t point that out, you’ve got a thing about people noticing that. One time your mom found this picture on the internet where someone Photoshopped your face to be even smaller, everything squished into the middle, and she couldn’t stop slapping her knee laughing. She even snorted. But, man, it was like those magazines for women where they have the skinny woman looking in the mirror and seeing a heavy woman, that picture was _your face_. 

“It’s actually pointier usually.” Mark is tucking his sideburns under the cap. “Your hair comes to this point? But it’s not like, a bad point. It makes you tall. Kinda looms. Your head does.”

“Jesus,” you say. _Jeepers_ , you internalize, but nobody says jeepers. 

“Don’t worry about it, nobody else notices this stuff. Plus the uh, the cowl evens it out. It’s like it’s not even your head!” Mark leans way over and rounds a hand over the space on top of your head, like feeling your head’s aura, the more perfect, rounded head that your head yearns to be. “It looks like an egg in there! But like, on its side egg, not the, the tall part of the egg.”

The SFX people come back with their tub of plaster and ask Mark to sit back down, they’ve gotta stay really, really still for a while now. Mark cooperates really well right up until they start bringing the giant brush lathered with plaster at his face and then he dodges left and makes that dad-sound, the _Ah-HAAA_. He does it three times and then settles. 

It looks really nice to have your face painted with plaster. They’re gonna do him first, then you. You can’t stop touching the top of your head. Isn’t “egghead” an insult? But Mark has chickens, maybe he just really likes eggs. You could ask your mom for an honest opinion on the shape of your head, but then the problem is she’d give it.

“Isn’t this gonna look weird?” You ask the backs of the people gathered in a circle around Mark. “I mean, isn’t it gonna be bigger than my actual head?”

One of them calls over her shoulder, “No.”

These people are going to have a bald, plaster version of his head sitting around here for, what? Months? Staring at it, doing things to it.

“What do you do with the heads when you’re done with them?” Mark asks out the side of his mouth and three people swat him on the arms, everyone yells, nobody answers. 

And you laugh, but like. What if they keep them? What if they’re gonna keep your head? You spin in your spinning chair and bring up eBay on your phone, search it for “celebrity heads”. Before anything comes up, though, you get a call. 

_Holy crap,_ your phone says in blinking text. _I know Robert Downey Jr._. It’s a reminder to be smooth.

“HEY. Hey, Downey. Whaaaat up?” What the hell was that? Laugh really quick to make it a joke. Yeah.

“Yeah. Where’s Mark?”

“Here! He’s right here, he’s, we’re getting the face casts done today.” 

You gesture over at Ruffalo, but he’s totally drowned in plaster, sucking air through a straw. It’s getting really weird over there.

“Well can they crack him out of it? The goat thing’s happening.”

“You know about the goat thing?”

“I’m a goat thing facilitator, Evans. Look, put Mark on the phone.”

You look at the phone, you look at the head collectors, you look at Mark’s ear coated and slowly caking. You look at the straw? No, probably not.

“He can’t come to the phone right now.”

Robert Downey Jr. blows a raspberry into your ear. 

“Well, you tell him that I’m not doing the goat thing alone, that is an investment in emotional energy that I could instead use to do all sorts of other shit. But, I mean, I wish the goat well. Tell him that. _Tell him_ that I am going to take this time to be in the sunshine in up-dog and to send good vibes to the goat. You tell him that, kid.”

Then Robert Downey Jr. hangs up on you.

Across the room, Mark’s head cast has solidified, mostly. The team is holding him by the shoulders. One of them yells right in his face, presumably because the plaster muffles sound.

“Do not. Try. To stand up!”

Then they leave.

“I don’t think they like people who are made out of...people,” you say. Mark tries to cock his head, but the plaster’s all down his neck so he has to crick his whole torso. “Oh, and Downey called? He called me for you, said he can’t do the goat thing?”

And then something terrible happens.

There’s this sound like Tom’s dinosaur impression after five beers, or a kazoo going nuclear. Mark is bellowing through the straw with such force that the plaster encasing his head and neck is in on it, resonating. He’s pounding his fists into his thighs, he’s bouncing in his seat, he looks like he’s gonna fall over.

“Uuuuuuuh!” you say. It attracts his attention. 

The bellowing stops for a moment, then comes back louder as he stands up. Up and _at you_ with the inertial force of however fucking many pounds of plaster tipping forward, so you have to catch him. You get him around the chest and he’s shaking around, trying to flail his arms, you think he’s starting to bleat, to bleat like an actual goat. You catch a glimpse of the two of you in the mirror: some coneheaded bald guy wrestling a human piñata. 

Of course the head people come stamping back in. 

“What in the _living fuck_ are you doing?”

“Are you assholes _rehearsing_?”

You find yourself tugged around the room by a bleating Mark Ruffalo, saying over and over, “I don’t know! I’m not in this scene! I’m not in this scene!”

Mark swings around, you lose your grip entirely, and he smashes his enormous head right into the wall. There’s a sickening crack. Then, on the floor, two halves of a head, Mark’s face inside-out inside them. They’re pristine. Mark looks over his shoulder at you, he’s grinning and biting his lip. A complex facial maneuver.

“I always wanted to do that.”

“You always wanted to make me pee myself?”

But nobody cares about your pee. The head collectors collect Mark’s head, they laugh with him and wrap his neck in a warm towel, they shuffle him off to get cleaned up, they shove you into your chair and tell you to stop moving and shut up for the next 20 minutes.

In the taxi on the way back to the hotel, Mark puts a paper bag down between you and him and starts picking bits of plaster out of his facial hair. 

“Did you...pick up lunch?” you say, indicating the bag.

“What?” He takes a full ten seconds to add some extra syllables in there. “Oh! No, they gave me a head. They just had it lying around, so. It’s Zoe Saldana’s.” 

He shrugs, accepting Zoe Saldana’s disembodied head as his due in life.

“Cool?” You have no idea when he had the time to build a relationship with those people that would culminate in them gifting him a head. “Uh, and hey, can I just ask...the goat thing?”

“What goat?”


End file.
